Record penalty of $660,000 for fruit market operator who underpaid employee

Record penalties of more than $660,000 have been issued against
the former owner of a Melbourne fruit market and his company which
deliberately ignored warnings about required pay rates and did not
pay a refugee worker any wages for weeks.

Abdulrahman Taleb, the former owner-operator of the Sunshine
Fruit Market in Sunshine, has been penalised $16,020 and his
company Mhoney Pty Ltd $644,000 in the Federal Circuit Court.

The total $660,020 in penalties is the largest ever achieved as
a result of a Fair Work Ombudsman litigation.

The court found a worker, an Afghani refugee who spoke little
English, was paid nothing for a number of weeks in early 2012 and
was later paid a flat rate of $10 an hour to a maximum of $120 per
day for moving and stacking fruit and vegetables at the market.

He should have been paid hourly rates of about $17 for normal
hours, up to $35 on weekends and up to $43 on public holidays under
the General Retail Industry Award 2010. The company also failed to
pay overtime rates.

The company underpaid the worker a total of $25,588 for two
periods of work, each of about two months, ending in April 2012 and
January 2013 respectively.

In his judgment, Judge Philip Burchardt criticised the scale of
the underpayments and said Mr Taleb, the "mind and will" of the
company, had been "taking advantage" of the worker.

The underpayments were so significant that the total not paid to
[the worker] was, in relative terms, enormous for such a short
time. Furthermore, for some of the time [he] was simply not paid at
all," Judge Burchardt said.

"I accept the submission of the [Ombudsman] that the way it
worked out was that [the worker] was paid wages of between $3.49
and $9.29 per hour," Judge Burchardt said.

"This was an egregious underpayment. It gave the respondents an
unfair advantage in the competitive retail industry."

The worker initially came to Australia as an asylum seeker and
spent time in detention before being granted Australian residency
and released in late 2010.

"[The worker] was a vulnerable employee in that he was a recent
arrival to Australia and totally lacked fluency in English, and
could reasonably be understood to be most unlikely to be aware of
any entitlements at law," Judge Burchardt said.

The Fair Work Ombudsman said the record penalties should serve
as a warning to employers that those who exploit workers face major
financial consequences.

The previous record penalties of $532,910 were secured by the
Fair Work Ombudsman in February against the former owner-operator
of an Albury cafe and his company, Rubee Enterprises Pty Ltd. That
matter involved exploitation of five workers, including two visa
holders.